To the Manor Born

by Peter Rimmer

  Down in the street, the broad leaves from the plane trees were falling on the pavement. All were red.

  “Would you like to go and live in Africa?” he said to the dog. The dog, with its leg up against a mottled trunk of a plane tree, took no notice. Jane wanted Gert to go back to Africa. She was always asking him when he was going. She had heard from someone his father was rich. Before, she did not want anything to do with Africa or a permanent relationship… Love really was for the birds. Poor old Christopher still swooning over Brett Kentrich the star of the show and Christopher getting nowhere. As Gert understood it, Harry was paying Brett visits. Like he used to do. He had, so they told Gert, paid for the flat off Regent Street anyway.

  Idly kicking the leaves, Gert wondered what his Uncle Johan would say to him bringing back an English girl. His Uncle Johan hated the English. Likely, he would show Jane his Boer War Mauser rifle that Uncle Johan notched seven times, each time after shooting an Englishman. Maybe it wasn’t just love in life that was so bizarre. One day he was going to properly direct a musical and not be told what to do every time by Oscar Fleming. Largely all Gert did was paint the sets and keep them moving smoothly between scenes during the performance. Poor old Christopher. Even Oscar Fleming had had an affair with Brett Kentrich. Once women knew a man really wanted them with no eyes for anyone else they treated them like dogs. Worse than dogs. Gert had Heinz 57 on a long lead. The dog was sniffing at everything. Far better off than Christopher Marlowe. The moment Christopher found someone else and was no longer interested in Brett, she would come running after him. It was the way of things. People always wanted what they could not have. Rarely appreciated what they had.

  As he walked the dog, Gert was trying to think of a way of taking out another girl in the chorus line, the irony of his own thoughts lost completely on him. Her name was Sylvia and she had very large breasts.

  Gert had to bring his mind suddenly into the present. Heinz 57 was trying to wind the lead around a lamp post. Gert shortened the lead and kept a firm grip on the dog.

  His mother would tell him to make his mind up once and for all. And settle down. In Africa. In the Cape of Good Hope. Thinking of that for a second, Gert found he was homesick making him stop suddenly in his tracks and half throttle the dog. He could see the Cape Dutch farmhouse in the Franschhoek Valley as clearly as if he was seeing his family home through his own eyes. It was spring in the Cape. The trellised rows of vines were just beginning to bud. Behind the barn-like farmhouse, he could see the mountains in his mind’s eye. They were blue and very beautiful.

  * * *

  The Madgwick brothers had left Murray Court in Ashtead on the Sunday morning just when the sun was coming up. It was the day after Gert had opened Christopher’s telegram from Robert St Clair. The brothers, nine years apart in age and looking nothing like each other, had filled their haversacks with sandwiches and walked the mile from the family home to the level crossing half a mile from Ashtead station where Christopher and Gert in the old days stepped off the train from London with the Madgwick family picnic basket. Christopher would have brought the basket finally restored to his mother, but the brothers intended to walk the woods and out the other side as far as Chessington Hall. Carrying the basket that far would have been awkward. It was the first time the siblings had gone into Ashtead Woods alone together. Growing up, a man of eighteen and a boy of nine were poles apart.

  By the time they walked into the woods, Christopher was thirty-four and Ralph turning twenty-six on 11 November. Ralph had celebrated the armistice that ended the war with Germany on his eighteenth birthday in France. By then he had lost his small finger to a German shell fragment, cut off as clean as a whistle. After that, with Christopher a captain in The Royal Dragoon Guards, the brothers had more in common. By the time they sat down under one of the oldest oak trees in England, they had a lot in common, particularly Madgwick and Madgwick, the family shipping and confirming house, which up till then neither had wanted to join with any conviction. Now Ralph was going to catch the eight-ten train to Waterloo the next morning. Life had changed for both of them.

  “You think she got the letter, Christopher?”

  “You got my name right!”

  Christopher had done his best getting Robert St Clair to write to his old friend Glen Hamilton in America asking Glen to deliver Ralph’s letter into Rebecca’s hands. Now it was in the lap of the gods.

  Christopher let the question hang in the air. The leaves were falling from the trees. The moss was springy and soft under his bottom. The tea from the flask was just how he liked it.

  Christopher looked across at his brother who was looking miserable. No one who did not know them had ever accused them of being brothers. Christopher was dark-eyed, dark-haired and slim from years of food deprivation in the attic room off Shaftesbury Avenue. He was slim and willowy tall. Posing as a poet had been easy. All bohemians were meant to be slim and slightly consumptive so when they died young their poetry would live forever. Why they wrote the poetry or painted the canvases knowing the shortness of life. Ralph was very different. He was thickset. Well built. Blonde. More blonde after he came back from Africa where the African sun had seemed to bleach his hair almost white forever. His eyes were blue. His hands practical.

  “Did you like Africa?” asked Christopher sipping his tea from the plastic cup that unscrewed from the top of the thermos flask.

  “Sitting up there on the edge of the Zambezi escarpment was like being God until Harry flew his aeroplane out of a clear blue sky one morning. Imagine that. A converted wartime bomber in the middle of Africa. There we were with Alfred looking down over the shrouded valley of the most exciting river in the world. Thinking about it makes me want to go back but that’s all over now… Why do we see that one woman and love her so much…? It wasn’t lust this time. Love. You know we have only kissed each other gently on the lips. She’ll write, won’t she? It was the same for both of us. It had to be. There was so much feeling. You can tell me, Christopher… Why is there just one woman who is so different from all the rest?”

  “I’ve never even kissed Brett.”

  This time Ralph stayed silent. He was again thinking of Africa wondering what had become of Alfred and the family of leopards. Keppel he knew was still up at Oxford. They had drifted apart. Africa and Rebecca drifted in and out of his mind.

  “Strange how people so close just drift apart,” said Ralph.

  “You think I’ll just drift apart from Brett?”

  “I was thinking of Keppel Howland. In the hols, he goes to his family in the Isle of Man. We don’t even write. All those years at school together and then in the army… You think I could ever drift apart from Rebecca?”

  “Our parents did. Except when we were around I don’t think they spoke to each other apart from the trivial. Most married people end up talking trivia. Did you know in the end they had separate bedrooms? Now, mother is so lonely she is beside herself… We were lucky you and I to be given life. Poor mother had so many miscarriages. No wonder it sapped their love. Could you hate someone for doing that? For giving you the wrong seed or having the wrong womb to bring the child to term?”

  “You know a lot about giving birth.”

  “Mother was telling me. Like a floodgate. I just sat and listened while she cried. Maybe we should try and get to know her better.”

  “I’ve never really spoken to mother,” said Ralph, “not about anything important. Like feelings.”

  “Neither had I… I hate coming down to Ashtead.”

  “Poor mother.”

  “There’s a price to pay for everything.”

  “Did you ever think of me as a brother when I was a child?”

  “Not really… There could have been a whole tribe of us. All those brothers and sisters dead before they started life.”

  “That would have been fun. One of them might have really liked being a shipbroker living in Surrey and catching the eight-ten train to Waterloo every morning for fifty year
s. Living in a row of expensive houses. Suburbia.”

  This time they both lapsed into silence. Neither wanted to talk about their responsibilities to the firm. What other people called their duty like going to war. The price they were obliged to pay for their privileged births. Their education at an expensive school.

  Eventually, they got up and walked further into the woods, comfortable in each other’s company. Christopher rather thought he liked his younger brother after all. Ralph during Christopher’s early life had been a pest. He had called his brother the sprog just to see him get annoyed. To make him go away. Ralph was then always hanging around his eldest brother, complaining he was bored. As if it was Christopher’s job to keep Ralph amused.

  “What are you smiling about?” asked Ralph.

  “You. I think if I called you a sprog now you would knock me up that bloody tree… Do you think I am being selfish? Not joining the old family firm?”

  “You have a great talent.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You make thousands of people happy watching your show. That’s a talent. A lot of people just make other people miserable. They come and see Happy Times and smile for weeks. I know. People have told me that many times.”

  “That’s the most beautiful compliment I have ever received.”

  “Leave Madgwick’s to me. I have no talent except for chasing showgirls and that gets boring in the end. It always ends up just the same. They all merge into each other. Meaningless. Pointless. Pointless for everyone.”

  “Maybe you’ll grow to like being a high blown executive. Some people like power. To them writing a silly musical would be a complete waste of time. They want money. Lots of it. And power.”

  “I never thought of power.”

  “Think of it, Ralph.”

  “Making money just to be powerful!”

  “That’s the stuff.”

  “How positively awful.”

  “Then think of providing lots of people with jobs. Linking the world by trade, not through force of arms. Helping lots of people through their lives who like being told what to do. Do you know, underneath most people like to be told what to do in a safe job with a weekly wage? That way they don’t have to think.”

  “Have I told you about my leopard cave where we lived in Africa? The three of us: Keppel, myself and Alfred? Alfred was a black man we picked up as a guide in Salisbury. That’s the capital of Southern Rhodesia.”

  “No, you haven’t. Then I had better sit down again.”

  “Please do. I’m going to have a sandwich.”

  “You’ve only just had your breakfast.”

  “Then, I want to hear all about the new show you are writing.”

  “Then I had better have a sandwich.”

  They were both laughing when they took off their haversacks and put them under another tree where the moss was growing thick. A rich green moss covered in autumn leaves. When they got down with their backs against the broad girth of the oak tree, a rabbit was watching them from out of the bracken on the other side of the bridle path that would lead them out of the woods, half a mile down the tunnel through the trees.

  “Do you really think most people don’t want to think?” asked Ralph.

  “Bertrand Russell says most people would rather die than think. And many of them do.”

  “He’s a philosopher. They like saying things that sound interesting. To impress.”

  “You are probably right… It may not even have been Bertrand Russell.”

  * * *

  Ralph found the telegram from Rebecca under the front door of his South Kensington flat when he went home from the office the following evening. The day at the office had been boring as usual. He thought he had learnt something for the long task ahead of him, which was something. He had put the information in a separate part of his brain. Where he had stored information to survive the war in the trenches. The other parts of his brain he kept for the more important matters. If there was anything more important than survival, which Ralph hoped with all his heart there was, then there wasn’t any point in going through it at all.

  “I love you, Ralph,” it said. Four small words that meant more to Ralph than surviving the war or running Madgwick and Madgwick.

  His depression lifted. The year would not be long. Intense happiness flooded his entire body.

  “There’s going to be a point to it, after all,” he said clutching the telegram and shutting the front door with the back of his foot. The brown envelope he had ripped open had floated down on to the wooden floor where it stayed.

  9

  April to May 1927 – Love on the Banks of the River

  Stella Fitzgerald was happily aware of being a first-class bitch. She had come to London in the spring for the summer grand tour of Europe. Provocatively attractive or dominantly beautiful as the moment required, she had cut a swathe through upper-class English society. Stella was twenty-two years old and from Boston, her father spinning money on Wall Street the way Barnaby St Clair played the stock market in London. The spring of 1927 in London was a hedonist’s paradise with the money dance becoming ever more frantic as the stock markets of the world went up and up.

  Old Patrick Fitzgerald, Stella’s father, ran liquor from Canada across the border into the States hoping the fools who called themselves politicians would not change the law of prohibition. The American government banning the sale of liquor had been for an Irish nationalist with balls, the laugh of the century. From trade unionist to managing the union’s pension fund to a bootlegger, richer than half of Ireland in one lifetime was the old man’s boast when he was drunk. His son, Stella’s brother, was already a small-time politician with better things in mind for the Fitzgerald family. Seamus was going to make the family name really big in America. Stella, according to her father’s instructions was to marry well. In Europe. To the eldest son of a duke if she could find one. The idea of sending money to Ireland to fight the damn British and his daughter to England for him to buy into the British aristocracy, was sweet irony to his peasant’s ears. It was his revenge twice over for being born poor with only his wits to get him through a material world.

  The three pillars of her father’s life were Money, Power and the Catholic Church, in that order, Stella always told herself in the brief moments of self-appraisal.

  “Every damn wop’s a duke in Italy looking for money from a woman. There are French dukes. Belgian counts. Spanish dukes. German princes. None are any damn good. Don’t mean a thing, my darling girl. The only throne that lasted was the throne of England. That’s the one I like. The one with meaning. My daughter a duchess married to a British duke. Now that’s sweet thinking. Then we’ll see our Seamus. Him a rich American out of Yale. His sister a duchess invited to Buckingham Palace… You only have one life, my darling girl. One life. Like your father out of the bogs of Ireland, make the most of it. We’re going to build a dynasty to rule the Anglo-Saxon world. The Fitzgeralds. People are going to remember us. For generations, my darling girl.”

  “Why did you wait till you were thirty-five to marry, father?”

  “The poor marry the poor. The rich marry the rich. Your grandfather was the richest Irishman in America. Luckily, your mother was born the last of a large Catholic family. For his eldest daughter, the old bastard would not so much have looked at me then. The trade union movement made me rich. When you control a pension fund worth millions, people do you favours. Including your grandfather when he wanted to borrow money. Often the rich look richer than they are. For the moment. Whoever lent money to a poor man, may I ask…? My daughter, the duchess. Now off with you to Europe. And, daughter darling, don’t you even think of money. You’ll have whatever you want. The best of everything. Remember, the Fitzgeralds of Boston are rich. You tell them that. Money always talks. The rest is up to you but the good Lord up there in heaven tells Patrick he has his money on the right filly. It’s all a game to me, my darling girl. Life’s a game.”

  * * *

 
; The prize invitation to the spring balls was the May Ball at Nuneham House, the seat of Lord Harcourt, on the banks of the River Thames four miles south of Oxford. Lady Harcourt, daughter of an Anglo-American banker, had been approached personally by the American ambassador to the Court of St James. Stella had promptly received her invitation at the Dorchester where she was staying in London, a stone’s throw from Merlin St Clair’s flat in Park Lane. The rest of the invitations to the May Ball had been sent out weeks before.

  “Oh, daddy, you really are good,” she smirked with the heavily embossed invitation in her hand. Stella had been in London for exactly ten days. The ambassador’s private secretary had telephoned Stella at the hotel the previous day telling her the invitation was on the way.

  There had been men all over the place giving her attention. One of whom would be asked to escort her to the dance. The invitation read:

  Miss Stella Fitzgerald and Partner

  The man had to be the right class but sufficiently realistic to allow Stella freedom to do what she wanted at the ball. She wanted an escort, not a partner. A man with predatory instincts like her own. Someone with his own reason for wanting to be seen at the best of the spring balls. Racking her brains for less than a minute, Stella began to smile. The young man with the rich man’s wife as his mistress. The perfect ice-cold escort with the very charm of the devil himself. Her father would indeed be proud of her choice. Barnaby St Clair was a man after his own heart.

  They had met the second night after Stella arrived in London with so many introductions arranged by her father she had not known where to begin. The man she phoned who invited her to the dinner party was her father’s investment man in London, C E Porter. That was the man’s name and no more. He was arrogant, too old for her and probably a crook if he did business with her father. He was only the means to an end.